


Donna's Promise

by MrProphet



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 09:00:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10693737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Donna's Promise

Donna stumped up the hill to find her grandfather, camped out as always with his chair and his telescope and his Thermos of tea.

“Brought you a top-up,” she said, waving the second Thermos.

Wilf looked her over. She looked good; the new job agreed with her and some of the bitterness was gone from her features. She wasn’t all that she could have been – that was the hardest thing for Wilf, to always know what she had been – but she was so much more than the woman the Doctor had left behind just six months ago.

For those six months, things had seemed to go right for her and she had blossomed with success. First finding the job at the library, then all those Open University course details someone had just left on their desk. Now she’d met some people through her course and was thinking about renting a place with them. She’d even been lucky with her allocation of supervisor, stating unreservedly that Mr Smith was ‘the best teacher ever’.

She sat beside him and poured out two cups. “Here you go, Gramps,” she said. “Chin chin.”

“Cheers, sweetheart,” Wilf said sadly.

“Weirdest thing happened at work today,” she told him.

“What? At the library?”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Donna snapped. “I get enough of that from Mum. ‘Why d’you want to work at the library? That’s not proper work. You should look for something with a career path.’ Does my nut; day in, day out. Then when something exciting happens to me,  _to me_ ” – she pointed at herself for emphasis – “instead of everyone else in the world  _but_  me, she just wants to know what sort of time I call this.”

“It’s alright,” Wilf laughed. “I understand; you can’t take a full-time job while you need the time for your correspondence courses.”

“It’s called distance learning now, Gramps,” Donna told him. “But I know you understand; I just wish  _she_  could. Sometimes, I think…” She shook her head and looked away into the sky. “It’s like there’s another world; a better world. Where I’m important and valued…”

Wilf half-stood, horror flooding him.

“And where I bashed Mum over the head with the teapot I made at school after I found it in the bin instead of running off to cry.”

With a laugh, Wilf relaxed. “Sweetheart, if everyone who ever felt your Mum was getting at them had bashed her over the head, you never would have been born.”  _And that would have been a_  very  _different world_. “And you’ll be valued here as long as I’m around.”

“Yeah,” Donna sighed. She dug in her pocket and passed Wilf an envelope. “Anyway, Merry Christmas.”

“Oh. Thank you, sweetheart,” Wilf said, tears in his eyes. “Yours is back at the house, but…”

“Open it now,” she said. “While it’s just us.”

Wilf nodded and opened the envelope, pulling out a card and a short letter. “Oh, Donna. Oh, sweetheart,” he choked.

“I thought, what can I get for a man who loves the stars?” she explained. “I can’t get you a star, ‘cause where would you put it, so I thought: ‘telescope’.”

“Thank you for your purchase of a day pass to the Royal Observatory Greenwich,” Wilf read. “Unfortunately…”

“Oh, no!” Donna groaned. “Oh, I knew I should’ve checked they’d got it right, but it only came today and…”

“No, wait,” Wilf told her. “Unfortunately the observatory will be closed for maintenance on your selected day and we have had to transfer your pass to the 27th of January. By way of apology, please accept, with our compliments, an all-expenses-paid weekend break, including all-access passes to the Royal Observatory Museum…” He looked up at Donna.

“What is it?”

“The Royal Observatory Museum, Torchwood House, Scotland,” he finished. “Donna; they’ve got some of the best optical telescopes in the world up there, and they still use ‘em.” He seized her hand. “I always said you were lucky, Donna. My lucky star.”

Donna squeezed his fingers. “Yeah; you did.”

“And you’ll come with me, of course.”

She grinned broadly. “Try stopping me, Gramps. Oh, this’ll be great for my course and everything.”

“Merry Christmas!” Wilf cried out, raising a hand to the skies. “Merry Christmas.”

“Gramps,” Donna said. “Who are you talking to?”

“No-one,” he laughed. “No-one. So, what happened at work?”

“Oh, that. Some nutter tried to feed this girl to a book. I swear:  _feed her_  to a book.”

“What happened?”

“Bloke comes in, orders a book from the rare collection – gets well chippy with Nina when she doesn’t pass it straight over the counter; starts giving her the hairy eyeball. Anyway, I tell him to leave it or he can whistle for his book and he sits down to wait while we check his accreditation.

“Four hours later – could’ve been thirty-five minutes, but he got on my nerves – he gets his book. Straight away he grabs this little girl from the children’s section and starts waving a knife around.”

“Oh, sweetheart! What did you do?”

“I sorted it,” she said proudly.

“I never doubted it,” Wilf assured her. “How?”

“Well, Nina was a great help; she fainted straight off…”

As Donna snuggled against her grandfather like a child and told him the tale of her heroic rescue – which her mother would read about the next day and dismiss as ‘ridiculous’ – the letter from the Royal Observatories lay on the ground between them, its final line left unread:

 _We hope you will have an enjoyable and enlightening time at Torchwood House._  
Best regards,  
Capt. J. Harkness, Administrator.


End file.
